Mike van Graan: Institute of Advanced Study Visiting Fellow

This last week, I was organsing seven events around special guest Mike van Graan. The Warwick Global Research Priority in International Development (GRP-ID), in response to my research and the new MA in Arts, Enterprise and Development, made this year's annual research theme ‘Cultural Economies and Cultural Activism’. Mike van Graan is a Warwick Institute of Advanced Study Visiting Fellow, and the IAS program funding made this itinerary possible, not forgetting the support of the GRP-ID – the leads, Prof. Shirin Rai (Dept. Politics) and Prof Ann Stewart (School of Law), and GRP-ID Coordinator Dr Rajnaara Akhtar. My PhD students Tomi Oladepo and Gabi Ferdinand, were similarly indispensible.

Mike van Graan is the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute and is the former Secretary General of the Arterial Network, a continent-wide network engaged in the African creative sector. He currently serves as a UNESCO Technical Expert on the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. He runs his own consultancy and has played numerous roles in South Africa’s developing cultural sector. His plays include Die Generaal (The Generaal), winner of the Fleur du Cap Best New Script Award 2008; Brothers in Blood, a Market Theatre production that won the Naledi Theatre Award for Best New Play 2009, Lago’s Last Dance which premiered on the Main Programme at the National Arts Festival and was nominated in the Fleur du Cap Best New Script category, 2009; and many others, including Green Man Flashing (2004), which our students here at Warwick have recently engaged with. Last year some of us saw the production of his play Rainbow Scars, which was programmed as part of the Afrovibes Festival, performed in Birmingham and London. In 2013 Mike van Graan was appointed as the first Festival Playwright at the National Arts Festival in South Africa. Four of his works, including a new piece, Writer's Block, were showcased at the Festival.

I know Mike as a valued member of Global Cultural Economy Network, a group of researchers, entrepreneurs and consultants, many independent UNESCO advisors who are attempting to develop a new paradigm of cultural thinking for policy – local, national and global.

A full report will be written of the week of events, so here I will just summarise the events and their outcomes.

The week started with a seminar for early career researchers and PhD students: ‘Researching Contemporary Culture in Africa’. It, moreover, attracted some students from outside Warwick: Adeolu Adesanya from Leicester University gave a talk on researching business on the informal economy of the streets of Lagos (Nigeria). He was one of four students presenting in this morning-long seminar, which opened with Mike van Graan’s detailed and informative lecture on the practicalities and methodologies necessary for cultural research in Africa. This was followes by lunch, where the staff members, two of the PhD students, along with Visiting Fellow from China, Dr Xiao Bo, convened as the panel of judges on the Warwick GRP-ID Annual Photography Competition. From a short list of twelve, each of which were exhibited beforehand, we chose three winners – announced by me at the Wednesday evening public event where Mike van Graan presented the winner with prize. Before that, however, we held a full ‘videod’ ‘Interview with Mike van Graan’, where Dr Yvette Hutchison (a South African and expert in African theatre) and I interviewed Mike to an open audience. He discussed his career, mission, values and pioneering cultural work across the African continent.

On the Wednesday, Mike delivered The Annual Public Lecture in International Development, and attracting a wide public and campus audience. This event is important, (last year was the UK Givernment minister for ID: Rt Hon Justine Greening), it serves as a showcase for the GRP-ID research and our central concerns for critical thinking, humanities research, gender and rights, and a radical democracy approach to development. Mike was perfect for this occasion, as he presented the work of the AFAI in the context of the promotion of rights, democracy and diversity in post-Aparthied South Africa. His talk will hopefully form the basis of a Special Issue I will edit of the Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development.

On Thursday morning we gathered for an exploratory seminar, called ‘Research Opportunities in Africa’. This meeting was open to potential collaborators at Warwick (specifically the GRP network) and saw Mike discussing the possibility of a strategic partnership with the African Arts Institute. We decided to collaborate on (i) student internships and PhD residency; (ii) funded projects focussing on local cultural development in Africa in the context of global cultural policies (details forthcoming). This last subject was the theme of Mike’s address to the fellows of the IAS the following day. His address was titled, 'Creative Economies and Cultural Activism in contemporary Africa', where framed by the South Africa’s White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (the first published in 1996, now revised), he explained how the political compromises of the government made cultural policy development fraught with contradictions.

Friday was our last, if intensive, day. The morning seminar was open to all University students but centrally featured students on my masters module ‘Culture and Social Innovation’ talking about our plans for a new international cultural festival in Coventry. The project is potentially huge, but in need of some advice and experience from the cultural sector veteran that Mike is. My role in this festival is to construct a 5-year strategic plan, (as well as mobilise the students), and aims within five years to be able to attract artists and musicians from all over the developing world.

After an agreeable lunch, the highlight of the week was the Friday afternoon ‘Global Cultural Economy Roundtable’. Apart from Mike, a special guest speaker was the UNESCO Chair in Cultural PoIicy for Germany, Professor Wolfgang Schneider. It also featured short position papers on the subject of culture as a resource for development: these were by Shane Homan (Monash), Anna Langdell (British Council), Tom Fleming (TFCC, London), Haili Ma (China Centre, Chester University) and my old PhD student Lorraine Lim (now Birkbeck College London). Following Mike’s introductory paper I will summarise the content of this debate as follows: First, we discussed how the concept of ‘culture’ can shift and change complexion depending on its role in policy discourse: so many assumptions that reinforce the semantics of culture are virtually meaningless in Africa. Second, cultural discourses are not merely intellectual, but embody the power and interests of institutions and agents of governance (including closed professional networks of elites); cultural discourse has evolved, whereby it animates national and international markets in various ways in relation to the production of cultural knowledge, creative goods and services. Third, there may seem like there exists a causal line from cultural discourse and cultural industries, but this is not so straightforward, and even where cultural discourse has relevance beyond a government signatory, it has to be understood, interpreted and implemented in local conditions, which, at least accross Africa, vary enormously. Fourth: global structural economic inequities and the lack of public infrastructure for culture in Africa, create a state of structutral dependency, where organisations, artists, agencies, and so on, work within the requirements and regulatory principles of their international funder and not local recipients or participants. With this state of affairs comes a passive acceptance of, rather than rigorous engagement with, cultural discourse and its industries. Lastly, the prevailing and dominant cultural discourses – as benign as they seem with their championing of rights and diversity – are embedded with world-views and embodied with assumptions biased in favour of certain Western paradigms. They cannot simply be taken as unequivocally constructive.

Jonathan Vickery : 12 May 2015 12:31 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem